That's all she wrote, folks; Macworld CreativePro is officially over, and by pretty much every account we've seen, it was... well, kind of a dud. Phrases like "ghost town," "crickets chirping," and "Burgess Meredith as the last man on earth who finally has time to read but winds up breaking his glasses like a doofus" figured heavily. We haven't been able to spot any official attendance numbers yet, but the Boston Globe reports that "only 40,000 Macintosh diehards were expected to show up"-- a "big drop from previous years," according to NYC's official tourist and convention bureau. (The Boston Herald reported that last year's show drew 58,000 visitors.)

Not much of a farewell blowout for New York, was it? Because starting next year, the show returns to its native Boston-- at least, in theory. The question now is whether there'll even be a show to move back in the first place. We're talking about an estimated 30% drop in attendance for the NYC show just because Steve didn't bother to attend; remember, Apple still had the biggest booth on the exhibit floor, and the first public display of the Power Mac G5 had to have some kind of drawing power to put butts in the seats (so to speak). The only missing factor was a Stevenote, but apparently that's the heart and soul of the Expo these days, and without it, CreativePro kinda flopped.

So the question, of course, is what kind of attendance numbers Boston can possibly expect, given Apple's stated intention not to come to next year's shindig at all. As in "no Stevenote, no booth, no nothin'." Now, this sort of thing has happened before, so let's consider the history: when Apple has pulled out of other shows, like Macworld Expo Tokyo and Apple Expo 2000, other vendors anticipated much lower attendance numbers and bailed themselves to avoid spending a ton of money to hawk their stuff to a much smaller-than-anticipated audience; that, in turn, prompted many prospective attendees to skip the show, since there'd be hardly anything to see. And then the shows' organizers pulled their respective plugs, because without vendors and attendees, it'd be less of a Mac trade show than a really effective way to lose millions of dollars. (Setting fire to wads of cash would only be marginally faster.)

Which means that either next summer's Boston show will be tiny, or it'll be cancelled altogether. The irony, of course, is that Boston got the gig back from New York in part by building a convention hall finally large enough to house a Macworld Expo in a single location-- and now it looks like the show will fit comfortably into the Dunkin' Donuts two blocks over. Unless, of course, Apple finally gets over whatever it has against Boston and deigns to drag its anthropomorphized behind out here to Beantown. We are not, however, holding our breath.

So, what... did Steve Jobs spit on a gypsy a few years back or something? Because the PowerPC Alliance seems to be afflicted by some kind of curse; whoever designs and produces Apple's high-end chips gets smacked upside the head with the Cosmic Lead Pipe of Karma. Nobody could forget that Motorola spent years trying to squeeze a little more performance out of the G4 as impatient Mac users tapped their feet and stared pointedly at their watches, and we all know how that turned out; Motorola's inability to escape from a positively glacial G4 improvement cycle was almost Shemplike in its failure. Blinding incompetence, or vengeful gypsy hex? Meanwhile, the company was laying off thousands of employees every twelve seconds and shutting down plants even as analysts kept telling it to sell off its semiconductor division before it dragged the company down to the murky depths of inescapable financial insolvency like some kind of slimy water zombie with dead, staring eyes and seaweed draped across its putrescent shoulders and... well, you get the general idea.

Anyway, eventually Apple decided that it didn't feel like sharing a premature watery grave, so it sought out the help of IBM-- both to manufacture G3s and Motorola-designed G4s (when Motorola couldn't keep up with demand) and to work on the G5, since the odds of the increasingly embedded-obsessed Moto surviving long enough to ship a next-generation PowerPC (at least, one that was appropriate for use in anything but a fridge that knows how cold you like your soda) seemed slim at best. And then things seemed good for Apple, at least in terms of the IBM relationship; the G4 shortfalls fell away, and the only problem with IBM's G3s was that they were occasionally faster than the G4s, which led to a bit of strife with Apple's whole "G3s for consumers, G4s for pros" strategy. And the G5, well, the chip's here ahead of schedule and it looks like one mother of a mover, and some people think it represents Apple's salvation. All good stuff.

But, as we said, what if Motorola's PowerPC woes weren't just the result of its own ineptitude, but rather sprung forth from some Evil Eye whammy that makes life miserable for whomever dares to try to bring Mac processor speed within competitive range of the Wintel set? We ask simply because suddenly IBM looks to be hitting a rough patch of its own, and we just hope this isn't the start of a Motorola-style Cavalcade of Ickiness"™. See, faithful viewer Mark G. tipped us off to a Reuters article about how Big Blue's $3 billion processor fabrication plant (you know, the one that figures so heavily in Apple's marketing fluff) is a "headache" due to "production problems" and is therefore "a reason why [IBM's] microchip business would lose money this year."

It seems that IBM's state-of-the-art plant "lost $110 million in the second quarter" ("Now, where the heck did I put that $110 million? I know I had it here a minute ago...") and now looks to lose money for the year, instead of contributing to an overall IBM profit. It might be nothing, of course-- just an early-days hiccup that temporarily knocked four bucks off IBM's stock price. But if we start hearing about copious layoffs and plant closures and, instead of reaching 3 GHz in a year as promised, the G5 languishes at 2.1 GHz until 2006, we'll know something supernatural is at work. Anyone know a good exorcist?

It's Friday again, and you know what that means: you're all exhausted from a solid week of pretending to work every time your boss walks past your cubicle, so you need to think happy thoughts this weekend to recharge for next week's daily grind of avoidance and make-believe. Which means you don't want to mull over serious stuff like the possibility of future Expo cancellations or troubles with IBM's new fabrication plant; you want massively uncorroborated rumors about extremely unlikely future Mac hardware! Are we right? Huh? Huh? Yeah, we thought so. Macintosh pipe dreams: good for what ails ya.

Thank goodness, then, for MacBidouille-- and, of course, for MacRumors, who does an exceptional job of always keeping at least one eye on the French. Those wacky Gallic G5 rumor specialists are even now tossing around whispers about a top secret Apple project code-named "Dark Star," which is allegedly a gargantuan server that supports up to 64 individual G5 processors and a full terabyte of RAM. 64 parallel G5s? We've done the extremely scientific math, and we've come to the conclusion that if using, say, two G5s can blow you clear through three walls of your house and into a tree, then using 64 of them simultaneously would be roughly equivalent to being fed live to a ravenous mountain lion, regurgitated into a meatgrinder, slowly ground into a thin paste, fed to a smaller mountain lion, and then hit by a ten-megaton atomic bomb with superfluous spiky bits welded onto it just for spite. And then stuck with the cleaning bill.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons why this type of thing strikes us as kind of unlikely, not the least of which being that Apple had a hard enough time cooling two G5s in the new Power Mac, and had to get seriously funky with nine independently-controlled smartfans and all sorts of crazy airflow channeling to keep its new pro desktop from melting straight through tabletops and burrowing through the earth's crust. If "Dark Star" has, say, a hundred fans all spinning at once, it'll wind up airborne. Assuming it doesn't blow the city's power grid first.

Whatever. Word has it that the 64-processor version of this behemoth will cost fifty grand, and will ship with Panther Server "at the end of the year." Now, granted, MacRumors itself warns that "some new reports suggest that this rumor is not true," but all you need to get through the weekend is visions of 64 G5 processors dancing in your head. Just imagine what you could do with all that power! We bet Solitaire is whole new game on a rig like that, baby!